Boycott

by Colin Murphy

  ‘Come back, you thieving blaggards. I’ll have the constable and the dogs after ye and ye’ll be off to Van Diemen’s Land! I’ll whip ye from here to County Cork and back!’

  But her threats were already fading in their ears as they fled through the trees towards safety.

  They found a hollow in the slopes of Ben Goram, the smaller mountain that lived in Croagh Patrick’s shadow, concealed themselves with branches and prepared to spend the night. A deepening chill was seeping into them and by dark a frost had begun to settle. The feeling began to fade from their toes and fingertips, so they were forced to risk a fire of heather kindling and a few branches, which Thomas started with their father’s tinderbox.

  ‘This hollow, it faces inland,’ Thomas reassured Owen, ‘away from sight of the road, and nobody will notice it.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll have the RIC after us?’

  Thomas considered for a moment then shook his head. ‘I doubt it. There’s people on that road below each day heading to Westport. Any of them could’ve stolen the bread.’

  Thomas produced the round of soda bread from his bundle and both of them stared at it as though it were priceless metal. There was still a little warmth left in it and the aroma beckoned to them. Owen salivated as he watched his brother break the loaf in two. Thomas put one half away and broke the other again, handing his brother a piece the size of his fist. Owen bit into it and moaned softly, its moist, crumbly texture and mildly sweet taste seeming like a gift from God himself.

  ‘Eat slowly or you’ll be sick.’

  They washed the bread down with water, groaning in fulfilment as a man will after a feast, then rested back and allowed the fire to warm their feet. Frugal as their meal had been, it was the finest moment of contentment they’d experienced in months.

  A million stars lighted the night and Owen lay staring at them for some minutes in idle contemplation of the relative fullness of his belly, until his thoughts strayed to the girl, near naked as she washed her hair. He felt himself grow hard and shifted away from Thomas to conceal it, reaching down beneath their blanket and sliding his hand inside his pants, taking his swollen penis in his grip. After a minute his youthful imaginings betrayed him to Thomas, who stirred uneasily beside him.

  ‘Are you playing with your pócar?’

  Owen rapidly withdrew his hand and sat there indignant in the dark. ‘I am not. I was sleeping.’

  Thomas laughed lightly. ‘It’s all right brother. I saw the girl too as I ran.’

  Owen felt a rush of anger as though the vision of the girl had been his alone to possess, then saw the stupidity of the notion. He sat and meditated for a time, watching Thomas’s face in the fading glow of the fire.

  ‘Thomas?’ he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

  ‘Try te get some sleep.’

  ‘I will but…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you think that our mother can see us, y’know, when we do sinful things, or when we think bad thoughts? Or our father?’

  There was a sniffle of amusement. ‘Like when you’re playing with yourself?’

  He bristled with embarrassment. ‘Yes…but not just that…y’know…’

  ‘No, I don’t. That’s bollocks,’ Thomas snapped, a little angrily.

  Owen pulled the thin blanket more tightly and after a few minutes felt his eyes grow weary. But his progress into sleep was disturbed by Thomas’s voice. ‘Owen…you know the meat we’ve been eating?’

  ‘What about it?’

  There was no reply. His brother’s face had all but vanished into the dimness, the embers of the fire having turned an ashy grey. ‘It’s just that…’ There was a long silence, until finally his voice came back more decisively, ‘…just that it’s starting te turn and we better eat it in the morning or it’ll be wasted. Go te sleep.’

  Owen didn’t reply, but sat there mulling over the brief exchange until the night folded him into slumber.

  The morning dawned crisp and clear, with a light covering of frost that faded quickly at the touch of the sun’s warmth. Light cloud drifted in from the ocean and Croagh Patrick’s summit was hidden in a veil of mist. Further out towards the horizon, grey, brooding clouds lingered and threatened to dampen the final trek to Westport.

  Thomas tore the last piece of meat in two and handed Owen his share. Thomas ate his piece quickly and turned away to gather their bundles. Owen hesitated, looking at the scrap of cooked flesh in his palm, before biting into it. There was a vaguely unpleasant taste, as though it was beginning to turn, which he washed away with a mouthful of water.

  They set about making a decent pace, following the curve of the lower mountain slopes; they rounded Ben Goram and then Croagh Patrick until they crossed the pilgrim’s path that snaked a steep and rocky way from Murrisk on the shore all the way to the holy mountain’s summit. This day no pilgrims made the journey and Owen imagined that pilgrimages were rare in recent times, as the energy-draining climb would have proven near impossible to starved limbs.

  On the road just fifty yards below, they could see far more people now, mostly groups of three or four, some with carts carrying all their worldly goods, others with a simple sack across their shoulder, and all wretched in appearance, walking in near silence towards the port or perhaps the misery of the workhouse.

  Thomas spoke: ‘It’s probably safe te go back to the road, so many people…’

  The sound of horses’ hooves silenced him. A small troop of soldiers appeared, red coats with a white ‘x’ on their breast, horses thundering along the road with great purpose, sending people scattering to avoid being trampled. Thomas instinctively pulled his brother behind a rock and they remained there until the sound of hooves had faded.

  ‘On second thoughts, let’s stay off the road.’

  They pressed on for hours, the terrain around Croagh Patrick ridge at intervals boggy or rocky and constantly undulating, reducing progress to a crawl. In the afternoon they rested in the narrow channel between two tiny loughs and ate half their remaining ration of bread. As they sat there, the last patch of blue sky was swallowed whole by a murky swell of cloud and they felt the first few drops of what threatened to be a downpour.

  ‘That’s almost all the food,’ Owen remarked.

  ‘We’ll get something in Westport.’

  ‘With what? We have no money.’

  ‘Trust me, Owen, I’ll get us food and tickets.’

  ‘But how?

  ‘Jesus! Just trust me.’

  There was no more discussion and they walked on two more miles, crossing the Owenwee River and turning north to follow the curve of the bay towards the town. They were in open countryside now, boggy and flat, with a lone squat tree protruding from infertile earth here and there. To the north they could see smoke from chimneys in the town. The rain began to fall in dank, grey sheets, dispiriting them further. They came across a track that ran from the south and in its muddy bed were the footprints of a group of people, mostly barefoot, women and children they guessed. They followed its course for an hour or so until they were brought to an abrupt stop as they crested a small rise in the land.

  There were six of them, two women, two boys, a girl and an infant. They lay in a hollow by the side of the track, ragged, huddled together, arms clinging to one another in a desperate union. All were dead, the rain washing mud from their emaciated faces.

  ‘How are they all dead?’ Owen’s voice quivered as he fought the urge to cry.

  Thomas spoke as though in a trance. ‘They must have been caught in the open last night…were barely alive anyway. The cold must have finished them off. Jesus Christ…’

  ‘Let’s go, Thomas.’

  Owen took his brother’s arm and pulled to break the hypnotic spell the dead seemed to have cast on him, Thomas looking back over his shoulder at the macabre scene until they rounded a bend and it was lost from sight.

  Eyes fixed on the muddy track, Thomas’s thoughts escaped him in a whisper. ‘Some day I swear I�
��ll make the bastards pay for all this. As God is my witness.’

  CHAPTER 8

  You must show the landlords that you intend to keep a firm grip on your homesteads and lands. You must not allow yourselves to be dispossessed as you were dispossessed in 1847.

  –Charles Stewart Parnell, speech in Westport, June 1879

  DAVITT SPEAKS OF THE IRISH LAND LEAGUE TO AN IMMENSE AUDIENCE

  The envoy of the Irish National Land League to this country, Michael Davitt, created the wildest enthusiasm in his audience. Events are marching so rapidly in Ireland, he said, that he had determined before leaving America to tell her people something about the real objectives of the Irish National Land League. ‘You hear about the League inciting outrages, and that the organization winks at assassination. The British Government knows that it is playing a trump card when it makes these grave and false charges. It knows that if it can make you believe them we shall lose your support. The truth is that the Land League has from its inception called on the people to abstain from violence of all kinds. The movement is an angry movement. It concerns the life and death of the Irish people, and for this reason the people have sprung to their feet and declared that, cost what it will, Irish landlordism must come down.’

  –The New York Times, 9 November 1880

  9 SEPTEMBER 1880

  Owen Joyce woke to the sight of Niamh, his ten year-old daughter, curled perfectly against his wife Síomha in their bed, as if they’d been crafted that way. During the night the child had wandered in from the other bedroom of their three-roomed cottage, the one she shared with her sixteen-year-old brother Tadhg, sleepily muttering about nightmares. He quietly slipped from the bed and pulled on his breeches. His own sleep hadn’t been untroubled – it rarely was – and he had a vague recollection of a dream of ships and his lost brother’s voice beckoning to him.

  He shook the memory away and dressed in silence, taking his boots outside into the room that served as kitchen and living space, sitting at the table to put them on. From the other bedroom he could hear Tadhg snoring on, a heavy sleeper from the day Owen had eased him from his mother’s womb.

  He judged it to be about six o’clock as he stepped out into the morning air, which was unexpectedly cool. A cloudless sky explained the chill and also meant a fine harvest day ahead, thank God, for thus far the season had been extremely temperamental.

  Owen walked around to the rear of the cottage and up the slight rise on which it had been built, the elevation keeping winter floods at bay and draining some of the damp from his floor. In the early morning stillness he could hear the gentle flow of the Bunnadober River a little to the north, and its sound reminded him of his business at hand, whereupon he stepped behind the stone wall that formed their privy and relieved himself.

  He paused on his way down the gentle rise and looked south towards the trees that surrounded Lough Mask House, Boycott’s home. The house was below his line of sight, but a stream of turf smoke already rose from its chimney and Owen could not help but imagine the man warm by a fireside, eating a breakfast of porridge, eggs, bread and tea, all paid for by the tenants’ labours.

  Trying not to let bitterness overwhelm him on such a beautiful morning, he went to the side of the house where he’d constructed a stone trough that caught the run-off from the sedge thatch. He washed his hands and then the sleep from his eyes. Síomha insisted that they wash every time they crossed her threshold, a rule the children especially found infuriating, but had eventually accepted. Owen returned briefly to the cottage and, with the aid of a pair of tongs, pulled a large potato from the grey cinders of yesterday’s fire. He wiped the ash off with his sleeve and bit into the still warm flesh, washing it down with a mug of water. He moved outside as he ate, gazing down at the two fields just below him, as yet unharvested, turnips in one, potatoes in the other. His field of potatoes alone, he considered, was three times the size of his father’s holding on Tawnyard Hill. In fact the thirty-six acres he farmed was almost twenty times the size of his father’s land and the soil much more productive. By any standards he’d made huge strides from those far-off days three decades ago when he’d left their home on the hillside, like a walking sack of bones. His house here by the shores of Lough Mask was more than twice the size of the cottage on Tawnyard Hill. He’d built a second, small bedroom as the children had begun to arrive. And his cottage had furniture – beds, a table and stools, even a cabinet in which Síomha stored her crockery. Besides his pony Anu, who doubled as their car and dray horse, he owned a small flock of sheep, which grazed one of the rougher fields away from the lakeshore and provided them with wool to sell at market. He grew a multiple of crops, potatoes the largest yield, but should the crop fail, turnips, carrots and oats could fill their bellies through the year.

  Yet he shook his head in wonderment that he could have all this and yet find himself on the brink of poverty and eviction, because after rent had been paid to Boycott there was barely enough food left to feed the four members of his family. By his father’s pitiful standards he was a wealthy man, although the notion seemed laughable. The only riches he possessed, he believed, were the three human beings sleeping within the walls behind him, and, of course, his other son, Lorcan, gone in search of a more prosperous life in America.

  He began to walk to Anu’s small, irregular enclosure, bound on all sides by dry stone walls, built long before he was born by hands that had pulled each stone from the earth, rendering the soil tillable. Anu was happily grazing in the morning light. As he slipped the harness over her head she gently nuzzled at him as though in greeting and he smiled and stroked her face. He suspected Anu would be lucky to see another summer.

  Owen led her down the slope to the potato field and harnessed her to the plough, fitted with a flat share in place of a moldboard, and with a row of prongs, angled to bring up the potatoes, which Tadhg and Síomha would gather later. He slapped Anu gently and the beast snorted and with an effort began to haul the plough across the field.

  After two appalling years, this season’s crop seemed a little improved, although the yield still threatened to be markedly down on their last decent year in ’77. And therein lay the rub. A bumper crop in ’76 and Boycott had used it as an excuse to increase rents drastically. Again in ’77 he’d pushed rents up. Then in ’78 and ’79 the dark days of a threatening famine had blackened the horizon for all of Ireland’s tenant farmers. Not blight, but bitter frosts had sought out the seed potatoes and turnips deep beneath the earth. The damage to the crops had been little less than catastrophic. Owen had barely survived the two hard years.

  With each year his family had traded off a bit more of their material worth to stay alive. Half of their original flock of sheep had been sold or slaughtered to feed them through the winters; they’d had to pawn the only decent suit he’d ever owned; and then poor Síomha, although she hadn’t shown her distress to him, had to sell the white dress that had served as her wedding dress as well as her Sunday frock. Now she wore her heavy winter shawl to mass, even in the summer months, to conceal her poverty. The clock her father had gifted her on their wedding had also been sacrificed, its pendulum ticking off the seconds of another’s life now. One piece of their dignity after another had been sold in an effort to satiate Boycott. And despite securing a ten percent reduction last year, they had as little chance of paying this year’s reckoning as Anu had of beating Boycott’s thoroughbred in a race. If God had put a more obdurate, parsimonious bastard on his earth, Owen was yet to meet him.

  ‘C’mon girl, whoh! Turn girl.’ He pulled on the rein and Anu swung about. He glanced back up towards the house and could see Síomha standing near the water trough. She waved at him briefly before disappearing inside, no doubt to rouse her son with a kick in the rump. It amused her to do this, and it seemed to be the only way to set their son in motion each morning. Not that he was lazy, for Tadhg was as industrious and spirited a lad as any father could wish for. He reminded Owen in many ways of Thomas.

 
; Two children and a wife to feed for a year, rent to pay, seed to be purchased for the next season, and even their clothes were threadbare, patches upon patches. He’d done the calculations a hundred times. Sacrifice this to pay for that. Rob Peter to pay Paul. No matter what way he weighed the problem, he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep the wolf from the door unless they could secure a large rent abatement. But what chance of that?

  What then to do? He knew better, as a man in his forty-eighth year, than to let his emotion rule his actions, which was probably just as well, as his emotions told him to brain Boycott with an axe. Not to say he’d abandoned the notion of direct action. But since his day in Irishtown last year, the Land Movement had made tremendous strides as a result of an unprecedented linking of parliamentarians and militant republicans. This coming together of the two strands of the Irish nationalism had been, Owen had to confess, a masterful achievement for Davitt and Parnell, a man still in his early thirties. But, ultimately, what had been achieved? While their aspirations were wondrous, to him they seemed like dreams plucked from some outlandish fairy tale. The Land League aimed to bring about a reduction in rack rents. Fine, who could argue with that? But they would also ‘facilitate the obtaining of ownership of the soil by the occupiers’. As if the landlords would surrender the prize they’d stolen hundreds of years before and upon which they’d grown fat and wealthy. Parnell had taken off on a grand tour of America, or so Owen had read in The Connaught Telegraph, where he’d met President Rutherford B Hayes, addressed the House of Representatives and raised almost £90,000 to support the League’s aims. He’d arrived back adorned by the press as: ‘The Uncrowned King of Ireland’. But as yet none of the ‘king’s’ proclamations had had any noticeable effect on the lowly tenant farmers. The League’s call to resist unjust rents was all very well, but how far would Parnell’s £90,000 go to housing and feeding the countless evicted?